Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I've seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft.You see, it's quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down. If you just yell stuff in the city square people ignore you. But there's a huge market in selling gold to players (cos it's easier to buy 1000 gold from a Chinese sweat-shop than bother to earn it by playing the game) and so the gold-spammers have hit on an ingenious solution.
Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you'll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it's quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere - to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars.
There's another one for the list of jobs that it would have been hard to predict existing in the C21st - virtual corpse spammer. But there seems to be quite a lot of skill to it.
Holly mackerel! Seamus is back!!!
Posted by: max | November 15, 2009 at 09:45 AM